Bachelor work published

A paper describing the research I carried out during my Bachelor’s project (eindproject) in Theoretical Chemistry has just been accepted by the Journal of Organometallic Chemistry. First author of the paper is Theodoor de Jong, the PhD student who supervised me during this project, and whose thesis this work will be a part of. I am listed as second author and Matthias Bickelhaupt, the associate professor supervising both Theodoor and me, is the third. The paper is titled “Oxidative Addition to Main Group versus Transition Metals. Insights from the Activation Strain Model”. It deals with the different reactivities of main-group metals (beryllium, magnesium, calcium) and transition metals (zinc, cadmium, palladium) towards simple hydrocarbons. The energy gap between a metal’s highest occupied and lowest unoccupied electron levels (the HOMO-LUMO gap) turns out to play an important role: a smaller gap means higher reactivity. As soon as I have a PDF copy of the paper, I’ll post the link.

I’ve also taken the opportunity to add a new page to my website: a list of my publications, including talks and presentations I’ve given. So far it contains only two refereed papers (one of which is currently under revision and will be resubmitted shortly). Three more are in preparation and will appear in due time.